Gorgias is a full ecommerce helpdesk, priced by ticket volume with a separate fee every time its AI resolves a conversation. Answer HQ is the alternative if you want AI answers on your storefront at a flat monthly price and you don't need an agent inbox with voice, SMS and social channels bolted on. Smaller stores usually pay less with a flat rate.

That's the short version, and the split matters more than any feature table. Gorgias charges for the ticket, so your bill moves with your support volume: on its pricing page, checked August 29, 2026, Starter is $40 a month for 50 tickets, Basic $90 for 300, Pro $550 for 2,000, and Advanced $1,430 for 5,000, with overages of $0.36 to $0.40 per ticket. AI Agent interactions are metered on top, at $1.50 per automated interaction past your included allowance. Answer HQ is $199 a month for 1,000 AI answers or $299 for 5,000, flat, with no per-agent charge and no per-resolution fee. If your questions are mostly "where is my order" and "do you ship to Canada", the cheaper model is the one that doesn't bill you twice for the same conversation.

How the pricing models actually differ

Gorgias splits every plan into two meters, a helpdesk allowance and an AI Agent allowance, and both keep running as you grow. A busy month is a more expensive month. That's defensible for a store with a real support team, because you're buying an inbox that many people work out of, and Gorgias doesn't charge per seat either.

The problem for a small store is that support volume and revenue don't move together month to month. You get a product recall, a shipping delay, a viral TikTok, and your support bill spikes in the same week your margins get worse.

Flat rate trades that away. You pick 1,000 or 5,000 AI answers a month, you pay $199 or $299, and a chaotic month costs the same as a quiet one. Yearly billing takes two months off. The full breakdown is on the pricing page, including the knowledge page limits, which are the real ceiling on our plans: 100 pages on Basic, 500 on Pro.

Is Gorgias worth it for a small Shopify store?

If your store runs on Shopify and you have two or more people answering tickets all day, yes, probably. Gorgias is built for that shape. You get one inbox across email, chat, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok Shop, macros and rules, voice and SMS as paid add-ons, and native connections to BigCommerce, Magento, WooCommerce, Klaviyo and a couple hundred other apps.

If you're the founder answering support between packing orders, most of that is machinery you'll never configure. What you need is for the repetitive questions to stop reaching you at all, and for the few that do to arrive somewhere simple.

What Answer HQ does instead

Answer HQ starts from your content rather than from your inbox. You point it at your store and your docs, it crawls them into a private Knowledge Vault, and the chat widget answers from that content with Quick Citations, so every answer links back to the page it came from. One script tag installs it, or on Shopify you install our app from the App Store and the widget goes in through a theme app embed, no theme code editing. Billing runs through Shopify's own plans page for merchants who install that way.

The widget has two tabs, Chat and Help. The Help tab is your help center living inside the widget: categories, articles, search. It shows up once you've published at least one article, and you can turn it off.

When the AI can't answer, the customer reaches you through a contact form in the conversation and it lands in Tickets, which threads by email. That's on every plan. It is not an agent console and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. There's no queue, no routing rules, no SLA management, no live chat with a human agent inside Answer HQ.

Order lookups work through our Shopify Connector, which is in beta and available on Pro and Growth. Mid-conversation, the assistant can check order status and stock, and you see a trace of what it searched. Zendesk and Cal.com connectors work the same way, also beta.

Which questions can AI actually resolve on a store?

The ones your documentation already answers, which for most stores is the majority. Shipping times, returns windows, sizing, materials, care instructions, wholesale enquiries, whether a discount code stacks.

The ones it can't resolve are the judgment calls: a damaged item, an exception to your returns policy, a customer who's already angry. Those should reach a human fast, and the honest way to evaluate any AI support tool is to check what happens on that path, not to admire the deflection rate.

Both tools will tell you which questions came in. On Pro and Growth, Answer HQ's Insights groups questions into Topics by meaning rather than keyword, across languages, and ranks the knowledge gaps: the questions customers asked that your content didn't answer. There's a flow that turns a gap into a draft article with the real customer questions pre-filled. I wrote about how that works when we shipped it in Introducing Insights.

How long does switching take?

Answer HQ is self-serve and live in minutes: import your site, publish the widget, done. Capital City Motorcycle Club went from signup to live in five minutes.

There's no Gorgias importer, and that's worth saying plainly. If your macros and rules are load-bearing, moving them is manual work. If your knowledge lives on your storefront and in a Google Doc, there's nothing to migrate in the first place.

Choose Gorgias if

  • Multiple agents work a shared inbox every day and you need macros, rules and permissions.
  • You need social, voice or SMS as real support channels. Answer HQ has none of these.
  • You're on BigCommerce, Magento or WooCommerce, or you depend on Klaviyo, Recharge or Yotpo integrations. Our connectors stop at Zendesk, Shopify, Cal.com and Google Drive.
  • Revenue-attribution reporting on support conversations is part of how you justify the spend.

Choose Answer HQ if

  • You want the repetitive questions answered before they become tickets, and a predictable flat bill.
  • You'd rather not pay per resolution when a busy month hits.
  • Your team is small, you don't want per-seat maths, and email handoff is enough.

FAQ

Is there a free version of Answer HQ?

No. There's a 14-day free trial on Basic and Pro, and Growth starts with a demo. I'd rather be straight about that than advertise a free tier that turns into a wall three days in. Gorgias runs free trials on its plans too, so you can test both against your own content before deciding.

How much does Gorgias cost per month?

As of August 29, 2026, Gorgias lists Starter at $40, Basic at $90, Pro at $550 and Advanced at $1,430 a month, each including a ticket allowance and a number of AI Agent interactions, with per-ticket overages and $1.50 per extra automated interaction. Voice and SMS are separate add-ons. Check their pricing page before quoting these back to anyone, since they change.

Does Answer HQ replace my helpdesk?

For a small store with no dedicated support team, often yes, because most of the volume is repeat questions and the rest can go to email. If several people work tickets side by side all day, treat Answer HQ as the layer that answers first and keep the helpdesk you have.

Can the AI look up an order?

Yes, through the Shopify Connector on Pro and Growth, which is in beta. The assistant checks order status and stock live during the conversation and shows what it searched.

What if the AI gets an answer wrong?

You fix the source, not the model. Answers come from your own pages and articles with a citation attached, so a wrong answer points straight at the page that needs editing. Articles can also be set to Assistant only, meaning they're used for answers but never cited and never published publicly.

The rest of the cluster

If you're comparing more than one tool, I've written the same honest version for Zendesk and Intercom, and a Shopify-specific walkthrough in best Shopify customer service software.

Try Answer HQ free for 14 days and point it at your store: start your trial.